Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Incomplete Poems 669
Across the blue-white moon-hush of my magic seas
A sudden sweeping of immense peripheries
Of darkness ringing lambent lustres; shadowy-vast
A nameless dread, a Power incalculable passed
Whose feet were death, whose wings were immortality;
Its changing mind was time, its heart eternity.
All opposites were there, unreconciled, uneased,
Struggling for victory, by victory unappeased.
All things it bore, even that which brings undying peace,
But secret, veiled, waiting for some supreme release.
I saw the spirit of the cosmic Ignorance;
I felt its power besiege my gloried fields of trance.
But now its huge Enigma had a voice, a cry
That echoed through my oceans of felicity.
A Voice arose that was so sweet and terrible
It thrilled the heart with love and pain, as if all hell
Tuned with all heaven in one inextricable note.
Born from abysmal depths on highest heights to float,
It carried all sorrow that the souls of creatures share,
Yet hinted every rapture that the gods can bear.
“O Son of God who cam’st into my blackest Night
To sound and know its gulfs and bring the immortal light
Into the passion of its darkness, castst thou man’s fate
For thy soul’s freedom and its magic are forfeit,
Renouncing the high pain that gave thee mortal birth
And made thy soul a seeker on the common earth?
When first the Eternal cast Himself abroad to be
His own unimaginable multiplicity,
Expressing in Time and shape what timelessly was there,
The mighty Mother stood alone in diamond air
And took into her that Godhead streaming from above
And worlds of her endless beauty and delight and love
Leaped from her fathomless heart.